The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Thursday, 13 October 2016

The Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights
(SIGTUR) launched its Futures Commission in
Johannesburg, South Africa, in June 2013 with the assistance of the Chris Hani Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s regional
office for Southern Africa. This Commission, a group of left-wing intellectuals
and trade union representatives, was entrusted with the task of undertaking first
steps towards developing concrete alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation. As a first step, the Futures Commission has
now published the booklet Challenging Corporate Capital: Creating an Alternative to Neo-liberalism. It includes
proposals for labour and tax justice, a fair trade regime, a democracy-driven,
public sector transformation as well as a response to the climate crisis. In
this blog post, I will provide brief overviews of the contributions as well as
links to the larger versions of the papers, freely available on the website of
the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg/South Africa.

The
failure of wealthy corporations and individuals to pay their share of tax
shifts the burden to less-well-off citizens, or results in programmes and
services being terminated or underfunded. This chapter is designed to
facilitate discussion about the issues surrounding corporate and elite tax
abuse. It begins with some preliminary definitions and makes a suggestion that
using a term such as “tax abuse” helps to focus on the implications of tax
manipulation, whether it is legal or illegal. Part One looks at the general
issue of corporate and individual tax abuse. Corporate activity primarily takes
the form of profit shifting, where companies organise their activity to show
profit in low-tax jurisdictions. Individual abuse takes the form of asset transferring,
where wealth and income is transferred to or hidden in low-tax areas. Part Two
focuses upon the issue in developing countries. Drawing examples primarily from
Africa, the operation of tax havens, investment routing and transfer pricing
are highlighted. Reform measures enacted to deal with these problems are
considered, as are the lessons from these experiments. The concluding section
raises some points for general discussion.

There have been divisions within the global
labour movement over free trade agreements (FTAs), part of an expanded free
trade agenda covering not only trade in goods, but also services, trade-related
investment measures, intellectual property rights and investor-state dispute
settlement mechanisms. European, export-oriented trade unions have tended to
support new FTAs, as they perceived them to be beneficial for “their”
companies, thereby securing their members’ jobs. By contrast, labour movements
in the Global South have objected as free trade has often signified
deindustrialisation and loss of jobs in their countries. In this chapter a
number of key demands are developed, which can potentially be supported by
labour movements from all over the world in the collective struggle for a “fair
trade” regime. One set of potential demands is suggested around the
re-assertion of national sovereignty. Another set of potential demands is
directed against the increasing structural power of transnational capital.

This chapter analyses
the dynamics underlying the push for privatising public services and explores
the possibilities for an alternative transformation of the public sector
through the active participation of the employees and users of these services.
Creating new commons based on co-operation through social mechanisms other than
price signals or managerial direction is put forward as a potential way forward.
Here, cognitive labour and knowledge are the common element that makes possible
the social structure of a commons as an activity and resource for everyone to
participate in and to enjoy.

This chapter
argues that confronting the deepening ecological crisis in a just transition
could contain the embryo of a democratic eco-socialist future. The core of
eco-socialism is to link the principles of ecological sustainability and social
justice. This implies that the socialist emphasis on collective ownership and
democratic control of production needs to be connected to a number of other
alternative concepts such as food sovereignty and energy democracy. New social
forms are emerging from the margins of South African society around these
concepts, involving grass-root networks marked by relations of reciprocity,
cooperation and solidarity. They embody fragments of a vision of an alternative
post-capitalist future.

These papers propose some initial ideas for alternatives to
neo-liberalism. Ultimately, however, real alternatives can only emerge from
concrete struggles. It is, therefore, the Future Commission’s hope that these
four papers will be discussed widely by the membership of trade unions
affiliated to SIGTUR.